John Kiriakou explained the access-agent concept as a solution to a specific intelligence problem: you cannot recruit a sitting president, the CEO of a major corporation, or a member of a royal family. The direct approach is impossible, because such high-value targets lack the traditional recruitment vulnerabilities — a need for money, a grudge against their own government, a sick relative needing treatment abroad — that a case officer is trained to exploit.[1][2] So instead you recruit someone who already has regular access to those people and can keep them in a controlled environment — the “next best thing.”[2][3]
The access agent requires two things: enough money to maintain a setting — an island, a mansion, a jet — where the targets feel comfortable enough to return repeatedly; and a disposition that makes high-status people feel valued. Kompromat may be collected opportunistically: hidden cameras throughout the property record behavior that could be used as leverage later. Kiriakou describes the classic method as wiring the house for audio and video, funding a staff, and letting the target confide sensitive or even classified information over martinis — information that is then passed back to handlers.[4][5]
A CIA instructor once told Kiriakou that the best recruitment of his 30-plus-year career was not a prime minister — prime ministers aren’t recruitable — but a copy-machine repairman, who planted a device inside a prime minister’s copy machine that transmitted every document copied to CIA headquarters, earning the instructor a medal and a photo op with the director.[6][7]
Kiriakou described Jeffrey Epstein’s operation on his island as matching this model precisely: a property fitted with hidden video cameras in every room including bathrooms, regular visits from former presidents, heads of government, and major executives, and a 2006 plea deal that gave Epstein six months of house arrest for offenses carrying a five-year mandatory minimum. Kiriakou’s assessment was that only MOSSAD and the Russians use extortion as a motivator, and that Epstein was working for Israeli intelligence.[8][9] Since Epstein himself lacked classified access, Kiriakou says his value was in entertaining and gathering compromising material on powerful people — a former president, a British prince, Microsoft’s founder among them — whose rooms at his private island were wired for audio and video, with underage girls supplied.[10]
On the Piers Morgan panel, Alan Dershowitz reacted angrily to Kiriakou’s access-agent claim, arguing that had Epstein really been an Israeli access agent he could have gotten a lighter sentence by confessing. Kiriakou’s retort was that confessing to espionage would have gotten Epstein hanged, not less time.[11] Kiriakou has said it is possible but unlikely the CIA discovered what MOSSAD was using Epstein for and demanded a cut, since doing so would have triggered a major turf battle requiring the CIA to go through the FBI given the domestic nexus.[12]
Epstein as the textbook case
John Kiriakou uses Jeffrey Epstein to define an access agent: if a service wants to know what Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew or Bill Gates thinks and cannot recruit them, it recruits someone with “regular easy access” to them — and “a little blackmail thrown in at the same time” raises the quality of the intelligence.[13][14]
The copy-machine repairman
Kiriakou’s standing illustration of the principle comes from his own training. An instructor told the class that the best recruitment he ever made over a thirty-year career was a copy machine repairman. The class laughed, and he made them hear him out: everyone wishes they could go overseas and recruit the prime minister, and none of them will. But recruit the repairman, and eventually the prime minister’s copy machine breaks down or needs servicing. Security watches him to be sure he steals no documents — which is not what he is there for. While he cleans and services the machine he installs a device, and from then on every copy made on it is transmitted to Langley.[15][16]
The pay-off is the definition: “You haven’t recruited the prime minister, but you did the next best thing, because everything that the prime minister is seeing, you are now seeing.”[16]
Kiriakou frames the alternative purpose in the same terms — an access agent may be run to collect from important people, or to plant a service’s point of view on a given issue in their minds.[17]
Access agents in wartime
Asked in April 2022 what the conversations inside the CIA about Ukraine would look like, Kiriakou split the answer in two. The first half was materiel and instruction — secure communications, night vision goggles, sniper rifles, close-in equipment, and a great deal of paramilitary training for the Ukrainians. The second was collection, and specifically a real focus on recruiting access agents to the Russian leadership: not the leadership itself, but the people around it who can be reached.[18][19]
The access agent as a free agent
The qualification Kiriakou attaches to the term is what makes it fit Epstein rather than a straightforwardly recruited asset. “An access agent is somebody who also can still be a free agent.” Having been recruited by one service, nothing stops him answering questions for another: “if the FBI has a question, maybe you can establish a quid pro quo with the FBI — maybe you answer the FBI’s question, or the CIA, or MI6 or MI5 or the French or whomever, because you want to bank those favours and maybe have some goodwill down the line in case you get jammed up.”[20]
The sentence he ends on turns the tradecraft into an epitaph: “he got jammed up, and he didn’t have anybody to help him.”[20]
His definition of the category itself is unchanged across tellings and is given here with its examples — the agent is not the man with the classified access but the man who reaches those who have it: “it’s not necessarily going to be Jeffrey Epstein that has access to classified information, but Peter Mandelson certainly does, and Bill Clinton does, and the former Prince Andrew certainly did” — with commercial and economic secrets available “from the likes of Bill Gates.”[21][22]